Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

near enough the fireplace to feel the warmth.
The children of wise parents like Cotton Mather, were also taught
"opificial and beneficial sciences," such as the mystery of medicine--a
mystery indeed in colonial times.
Puritan schoolmasters believed, as did Puritan parents, that sparing the
rod spoiled the child, and great latitude was given in punishment; the
rod and ferule were fiercely and frequently plied "with lamming and with
whipping, and such benefits of nature" as in English schools of the same
date. When young men were publicly whipped in colleges, children were
sure to be well trained in smaller schools. Every gradation of
chastisement was known and every instrument from



    "A beesome of byrche for babes verye fit

     To a long lastinge lybbet for lubbers as meete,"
from the "thimell-pie" of the dame's school--a smart tapping on the head
with a heavy thimble--to belaboring with a heavy walnut stick or oaken
ruler. Master Lovell, that tigerish Boston teacher, whipped the culprit
with birch rods and forced another scholar to hold the sufferer on his
back. Other schoolmasters whipped on the soles of the feet, and one
teacher roared out, "Oh the Caitiffs! it is good for them." Not only
were children whipped, but many ingenious instruments of torture were
invented. One instructor made his scholars sit on a "bark seat turned
upside down with his thumb on the knot of a floor." Another master of
the inquisition invented a unipod--a stool with one leg--sometimes
placed in the middle of the seat, sometimes on the edge, on which the
unfortunate scholar tiresomely balanced. Others sent out the suffering
pupil to cut a branch of a tree, and, making a split in the large end of
the branch, sprung it on the culprit's nose, and he stood painfully
pinched, an object of ridicule with his spreading branch of leaves. One
cruel master invented an instrument of torture which he called a
flapper. It was a heavy piece of leather six inches in diameter with a
hole in the middle, and was fastened at the edge to a pliable handle.
The blistering pain inflicted by this brutal instrument can well be
imagined. At another school, whipping of unlucky wights was done "upon a
peaked block with a tattling stick;" and this expression of colonial
severity seems to take on additional force and cruelty in our minds that
we do not at all know what a tattling stick was, nor understand what was
meant by a peaked block.
I often fancy I should have enjoyed living in the good old times, but I
am glad I never was a child in colonial New England--to have been
baptized in ice water, fed on brown bread and warm beer, to have had to
learn the Assembly's Catechism and "explain all the Quaestions with
conferring Texts," to have been constantly threatened with fear of death
and terror of God, to have been forced to commit Wigglesworth's "Day of
Doom" to memory, and, after all, to have been whipped with a tattling